The Academic Relations Team is responsible for offering IT students and faculty members free access to software, for enhancing knowledge and skills by providing curriculum materials and other learning opportunities, for helping students achieve their dreams by organizing an international competition, and finally for assisting last year students through career resources and job opportunities at our customers and partners. With this blog we want to inform you on our latest initiatives. Enjoy reading and stay tuned!

Register now for the next MSDN Live Meeting (organized by Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg) on April 12, 2011 : Lunchbox - Developing a Windows Phone 7 Application at Microsoft leveraging Windows Azure. Timing April 12, 2011 - 14:00 – 15:30 (Belgian time: GMT +01:00) Abstract The Lunchbox Windows Phone 7 application was developed by a group of enthusiast people within Microsoft to showcase the Microsoft application platform. We have found that in developing an application that requires some server...

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation. Windows Azure Windows Azure is a cloud-computing platform that lets you run applications and store data in the cloud. Instead of having to worry about building...

On March 22th the first Microsoft Cloud and Interoperability Center (CIC) was inaugurated in Brussels. The goal of the Center is to promotes cloud computing innovation in Europe by showcasing the latest technologies and solutions in areas such as education, health and e-government as well as advanced research projects. The Cloud and Interoperability Center is part of the existing Microsoft Executive Briefing Center and also includes the Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) for Cloud Solutions...

Stay up to date with the latest news from MSDN and TechNet in Belgium and Luxembourg via our new desktop gadget . It’s free, easy to install and very practical: you won’t miss anything of the latest tech news, blogs, videos and events as they are all fed right into your desktop! Small & Large Once you’ve installed the gadget, you’ll see that there are 2 formats available: the small format rotates the latest news, the large format consists of 4 tabs ( News, Events, Blogs and Videos ). Every post...

Check out the live agenda and find out why you should attend TechDays 2011 . Review the sessions and speakers and build your own personalized agenda. Today we already have more than 1200 registrations. Don’t lose time and register now before the event sells out! If you haven't decided yet, we give you more than just a few reasons why you should not miss this event. Developer Opening Keynote We are happy to announce Scott Hanselman will be joining TechDays 2011 for the developer Opening...

Internet Explorer 9 RTW is now available for download. The latest version of IE is strong on speed and standards support, providing experiences that are just as vivid, interactive, and high-fidelity as native applications - without the need for plug-ins. IE9 includes support for HTML5 with features like Canvas, video and audio, semantic tagging,…; CSS3 , SVG, ECMAScript5, a brand new JavaScript engine dubbed Chakra . With features like SmartScreen and Tracking Protection , security stays a top priority...

Service Pack 1 is ready for download. Microsoft continues to invest in Visual Studio 2010 with Service Pack 1 . In this release we addressed some of the most requested features and top voted issues from customers. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 delivers improvements to IntelliTrace, unit testing, and Silverlight profiling, as well as many other areas, resulting in a better experience and increased stability . Download it here. Resources: Visual Studio home page news feed Visual Studio Service Packs Visual...

On February 21, 2011 we invited the top 20 winners of the ‘Crack the code’ contest ( http://www.itinyourdna.be ) to an exclusive Awards Ceremony at the Microsoft Belgium office in Zaventem. The evening get-to-gether was kicked off by Luc Van de Velde (Director of the Developer and Platform Group), sharing his views on the evolution of the IT industry and his own personal IT story. The winners were then called on stage to receive their prize, followed by a guided tour of the office, explaining the...

The February 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes several updates and bug fixes for the hands-on labs. Most of the updates were focused on supporting the new Windows Azure AppFabric February CTP and the new portal experience for AppFabric Caching, Access Control, and the Service Bus. The specific content that was updated in this release includes: · Hands-on Lab - Building Windows Azure Apps with the Caching service · Hands-on Lab – Using the...

The 2011 Data News Awards for Excellence are an important annual ICT contest and event. Microsoft is nominated for these awards, we hope we can count on your vote in two categories: Software company of the year: · Also in 2010, we offer you the broadest set of software solutions for both the consumer and businesses, small & large. · We bridge both on-premise solutions and public Cloud Power. Microsoft leads in customer cloud solutions with Windows Live Hotmail and Office Web Apps; and is number...

HTML5 Web Camp Belgium on April 6th is now open for registration. Enjoy a full afternoon of sessions delivered by the Belgian web agencies and partners including Netlog, LBi and These Days. What : HTML5 Web Camp Belgium – a full afternoon of sessions presented by the Belgian web companies followed by a reception Where : Living Tomorrow Indringingsweg 1 Vilvoorde When : April 6th 2011 13:30 to 18:00 – Sessions by Netlog, Ferranti, These Days and LBi 18:30 to 22:00 – Reception (optional registration...